Practical Benefits, Challenges, and Recommendations on Social Media Recruitment: Multi-Stakeholder Interview Study (Preprint)

Abstract

BACKGROUND The increasing use of social media over time opens new opportunities for recruiting patients for research studies. However, systematic evaluations indicate that the success of social media recruitment in terms of cost-effectiveness and representativeness depends on the type of study and its purpose. OBJECTIVE This study aims to explore the practical benefits and challenges of recruiting study participants with social media in the context of clinical and non-clinical medical studies and provide a summary of expert advice on how to conduce social-media-based recruitment. METHODS We interviewed 6 Hepatitis B patients who use social media and/or have been in touch with social media recruitment and 30 experts from the following disciplines: (1) social media researchers or social scientists, (2) practical experts for SMR, (3) legal experts, (4) ethics committees’ members, and (5) members of the TherVacB consortium. The interview transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis and qualitative data analysis software (Atlas.ti 8.0). RESULTS Our findings indicate that there are diverging expert opinions regarding the challenges and benefits of social media recruitment for research studies especially in these four domains: (1) Resources needed; (2) Representativeness; (3) Online community building; (4) Privacy considerations. Despite these divergent opinions, the interviewed experts also provided detailed practical advice on how to promote a research study via social media, based on their own experiences and theoretical considerations. CONCLUSIONS Even though recruitment strategies should always be study-specific, a multi-platform approach (recruiting via several different social media platforms) with mixed-methods recruitment (online and offline recruitment channels) is the most beneficial recruitment strategy for many research studies. The different recruiting methods complement each other and may contribute to increase the reach of the study, the recruitment accrual, and the representativeness of the sample. However, it is important to assess the context- and project-specific appropriateness and usefulness of social media recruitment before designing the recruitment strategy.